Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (146 page)

The same defensive mood affected Protestant Christians most antagonistic to papal Catholicism. Not all Evangelicals were as sanguine about Darwin as President McCosh of Princeton. From the 1870s a series of Evangelical conferences, among the most prominent of which were those held at Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario, reinforced a mood of resistance to Darwinist biology and the Tubingen approach to the Bible. The movement was given an international dimension by Ira Sankey and Dwight L. Moody, who adapted the old American revivalist style to nineteenth-century theatre entertainment: Sankey sang sacred songs, many freshly composed, and Moody was a preacher of extrovert charisma. Their extensive travels had an impact throughout the anglophone world; those involved were much influenced by the growing Evangelical enthusiasm for a 'dispensationalist' view of God's purposes in history (see pp. 911-12). From dispensationalism grew another 'ism': 'Fundamentalism' was a name derived from twelve volumes of essays issued in the USA by a combination of British and American conservative writers between 1910 and 1915, entitled
The Fundamentals
. Central to these essays was an emphasis on five main points: the impossibility of the biblical text being mistaken in its literal meaning ('verbal inerrancy'), the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, the idea that Jesus died on the Cross in the place of sinners (an atonement theory technically known as penal substitution) and the proposition that Christ was physically resurrected to return again in flesh. Fundamentalists created organizations to promote this case: in 1919 the World's Christian Fundamentals Organization was founded, expanding through its use of mass rallies from a mainly Baptist base to affect most Protestant Churches. Fundamentalism is a distinctively Protestant idea, because it centres on the Reformation way of reading the Bible. Reformation Protestantism turned its back on most of the ancient symbolic, poetic or allegorical ways of looking at the biblical text, and read it in a literal way. As part of that literal reading, concentrating on a line of thought on salvation pursued by St Paul, came the penal substitution theory, and Fundamentalists rightly concluded that these were the aspects of Christianity most vulnerable to attack from nineteenth-century intellectual developments. Fundamentalists were nevertheless to find in the twentieth century and beyond that many new battles grew out of their five principles.

By 1914, then, Western Christianity was caught between two extremes of proclamation: stark and selective affirmations of traditional beliefs and, at the other end of the spectrum, a denial of any authority or reality behind Christian truth-claims. Beyond the materialism of Feuerbach and Marx was a vigorous hostility to Christianity developed by the son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche. His experience of revelation in August 1881 was the exhilarating discovery that to be conscious of the lack of divine purpose or providence is to find freedom.
¹⁰⁶
Through this, we can truly affirm our being, and for this internal freedom to find fulfilment, it is necessary for the external God to 'die', since there is no cosmic order to regulate our lives. It is seldom appreciated that Nietzsche's emphasis on the death of God was not original: he was standing in the logic of the Lutheran tradition which had moulded him, and so of Augustine and Paul beyond. Before Nietzsche, Hegel had emphasized that the death of God himself in Jesus was an inescapable aspect of the humanity within God. He had backed his affirmation by citing the cry 'God himself is dead', in a hymn of seventeenth-century Lutheranism by another Lutheran pastor's son, so classic as to have been harmonized by J. S. Bach and made the subject of an organ prelude by Brahms:
O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid
('Oh darkest woe! Ye tears, forth flow!').
¹⁰⁷
Nietzsche simply reversed the logic of the tradition from Paul to Augustine to Luther. He saw Christ as an example to be avoided, because Christ denied the world. God was not merely in the dock, but condemned and executed. This would lead to another death, as Darwinian biology had already indicated for Nietzsche: 'morality will gradually
perish
now: that great spectacle in a hundred acts that is reserved for Europe's next two centuries, the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also most hopeful of all spectacles'.
¹⁰⁸

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has described Nietzsche as the central figure in a trilogy of what he usefully terms 'the masters of suspicion', the predecessor being Karl Marx and the successor Sigmund Freud: those who gathered together the two previous centuries of questions posed to Christian authority, and persuaded much of the Western world that there was no authority there at all. Behind all three lies Ludwig Feuerbach, who first voiced the idea that God might be part of humanity's creation, rather than vice versa.
¹⁰⁹
There is thus a deep contradiction in the period. The nineteenth century has usually been seen as principally the time of these 'masters of suspicion' in Europe: a century of disenchantment with Christianity and the supernatural in an age of science, a period of ebbing of European faith. Yet it was crowded with visionaries both Catholic and Protestant, full of excitement about the End Times, noisy with the sound of building for new churches and monasteries and the voices of furious quarrels about the best way forward for Christian renewal. It saw the beginning of a move towards virtual extinction for ancient non-Chalcedonian Christian Churches in their homelands, and the posing of profound questions for the authority of Western Christianity. Yet as we will discover, it was also the period in which the Christian faith triumphantly spread its reach into every continent with a vigour never before witnessed and in which Christian governments came to support one of the most profound changes in Christian morality since the Crusades first sanctified full-scale warfare in the name of Christ.

23

To Make the World Protestant (1700-1914)

SLAVERY AND ITS ABOLITION: A NEW CHRISTIAN TABOO

In the United States of America, alongside 'The Star-Spangled Banner', given Congress's blessing in the twentieth century, there is a rather older unofficial national anthem:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears reliev'd;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believ'd!

A haunting melismatic tune, an anonymous product of the popular hymnody of the eastern American seaboard, has fixed these words as emblematic of American Protestantism, beloved alike among black, white and Native American congregations. Yet they come from a different world which has never had quite the same affection for them - a remote and scattered parish in Buckinghamshire, west of London, where they were penned by a former slave trader turned parson of Olney.
¹
At many levels, 'Amazing Grace' is a fitting anthem to commemorate a century of Anglo-American Protestant expansion, whose prosperity had been founded on slave-owning and slave-trading. That same Protestant society then led the world away from slavery.

In that hour when John Newton 'first believ'd', he saw no incongruity between his newly awakened faith and his trade of shipping fellow human beings from West Africa to America. In fact he saw the slave trade as having helped him reshape his life after a chaotic youth, and in his autobiography, written in mid-life, he observed with no condemnation of his former career that he had been 'upon the whole, satisfied with it, as the appointment Providence had marked out for me'.
²
The trade taught him discipline, and formed the setting for his Evangelical Calvinist conversion in 1747, after which happy experience he continued to pass on his new-found discipline to his unruly charges by applying thumbscrews to them when necessary. A stroke, not any qualm of conscience about slavery, ended his career at sea in 1754. It took three decades for him publicly to express revulsion for his old business and make common cause with those now seeking to abolish it, grown from a group of eccentrics to a national movement. 'I am bound in conscience,' the old man said bravely in 1788, 'to take shame to myself by a public confession, which, however sincere, comes too late to prevent or repair the misery and mischief to which I have, formally been an accessory.'
³
Newton's belated change of heart was part of a new departure in Christianity: a conviction which over two centuries has now become well-nigh universal among Christians that slavery in all circumstances is against the will of God.

There had of course long been a widespread opinion that slavery was not a desirable condition - particularly for oneself. Frequently Christians had felt that being a Christian and being a slave were not compatible, so that it was an act of Christian charity to free slaves. But that is very different from condemning the whole institution - hardly surprisingly, since the Christian Bible, both Tanakh and New Testament, unmistakably takes the condition of slavery for granted.
⁴
Quite apart from its general connivance with slavery's existence, the Bible contributed a useful prop to the institution, in the story of the drunkenness of Noah. A drunken and naked Noah was humiliated when his son Ham saw him in this state, and subsequently Noah cursed Canaan, son of Ham, and all his descendants to slavery at the hands of Ham's elder brothers, Shem and Japheth.
⁵
Apart from its popularity among medieval Western preachers, who saw in the story a pleasingly ingenious allegory of Christ's Passion and human redemption (Michelangelo uses it thus on the Sistine Chapel ceiling), this story was regularly trotted out by slave traders both Christian and Muslim to justify enslaving Africans, children of Ham.
⁶
It is in early Muslim sources that the Bible's listing of many black races among Ham's descendants was first extended into an aspect of Noah's curse - the first Muslims were familiar with black slaves from across the Red Sea. This interpretation ignored the fact that the Bible indicated that the curse was actually pronounced on Canaan and not his voyeur father (a baffling shift which Genesis does not explain), and further that Canaanites were not actually among the black races of the ancient world.
⁷

The link between blackness and slavery reached the Christian West late, and it was ironically via Judaism. Just when the Portuguese were beginning to take their share of the African slave trade, in the late fifteenth century, a celebrated Portuguese Jewish philosopher, Isaac ben Abravanel, suggested that Caanan's descendants were black, while those of his uncles were white, and so all black people were liable to be enslaved. Genesis 9 gives no support to this belief; nevertheless Abravanel's innovative exercise in biblical hermeneutics now proved extremely convenient for the same Iberian Christians who persecuted his own people, and later for Christian slavers everywhere.
⁸
Other Christians followed a different line in biblical interpretation not found in any Western Bible, but traceable right back to a reading in the Syriac
Peshitta
version of the story of Cain in Genesis 4.1-16: according to this Syriac take on the biblical text, black people actually descended from Cain because when God had punished Cain for killing his brother Abel, the 'mark' he gave the murderer was to blacken his skin. It was reasonable to suppose that this applied to all Cain's descendants.
⁹
Neither biblical approach was calculated to raise the status of people defined as black.

It took original minds to kick against the authority of sacred scripture. What was needed was a prior conviction in one's conscience of the wrongness of slavery, which one might then decide to justify by a purposeful re-examination of the biblical text - it was an early form of the modern critical reconsideration of biblical intention and meaning.
¹⁰
It was possible for people in the Puritan tradition to do so: that independent-minded Massachusetts judge Samuel Sewall, who had recently had the courage to make a public apology for his part in the Salem witch trials (see pp. 755-6), was one of the first. In 1700 he wrote a pamphlet highlighting a comment in Mosaic Law which had not been much considered before: 'He that stealeth a man and selleth him, or if he be found in his hand, he shall surely be put to death' (Exodus 21.16). Coolly Sewall's pamphlet then demolished the standard Christian wisdom of his day on slavery, argument by argument.
¹¹
Back in Europe, it was possible for the Enlightenment to motivate people to argue for abolition, as part of the general Enlightenment urge to question ancient certainties. The
Encylopedie
's entry on 'Commerce' furiously attacked the slave trade, while in his
De l'Esprit des Lois
(1748) one of the most respected authors of the French Enlightenment, the Baron de Montesquieu, himself an inhabitant of the great slaving port of Bordeaux, like Sewall pitilessly dissected the various arguments justifying slavery, biblical and Classical, and showed their inadequacy.
¹²

By contrast, other intellectuals of the Enlightenment contributed substitute rationales for slavery, because they began studying world racial categories, and it became eminently possible to use this new 'science' as the basis for finding certain races inferior in characteristics and ripe for enslavement - especially if one despised the creation stories of Genesis, which did give all humankind a common ancestry in Adam and Eve. So both Christianity and the Enlightenment could lead Westerners in opposite directions on slavery. Far less equivocal than the
philosophes
were Pennsylvania Quakers, whose tradition enabled them to be less reverent towards biblical authority (see pp. 782-3). They anticipated Sewall by twelve years, with a petition against slavery in Pennsylvania from some Dutch Quakers in 1688. Their brethren at that stage chose to ignore the initiative, but, tempted in the early eighteenth century to join their fellow colonists in using the growing number of slaves to sustain their Quaker haven, the Pennsylvania authorities now displayed their usual consecrated cussedness and came down firmly against slavery of any sort in 1758, the first Christians corporately to do so.